Judging by the dismal record of the hapless US military over the last few decades, it sure ain’t much of one.

“Press Secretary Smites Fox Host That Dissed Diversity in U.S. Military,” a Department of Defense headline read Thursday.

“I want to be very clear right up front, that the diversity of our military is one of our greatest strengths,” Pentagon press secretary and former CNN commentator John Kirby said during a Thursday briefing. “I’ve seen it for myself in long months at sea and in the combat waged by our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve seen it up on Capitol Hill just this past month. And I see it every day here right at the Pentagon.”

Gee, Mr General Kirby sir, are you really sure you want to bring up the twenty-year-long inability to dispense with a few thousand dress-wearing, sub-literate, cave-dwelling goatherds in Afghanistan as evidence supporting the unchallengeable supremacy of Amerika’s shiny new one hundred percent PC military? Or the abject failure to subdue and pacify a band of like yodeling barbarians in Iraq? Or the ongoing ineffectual floundering in who even knows how many other ragged-ass Third World shitrapies across the globe?

Kirby was responding to comments made by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who said during his March 9 show that Biden’s Department of Defense is more focused on woke adventurism than winning wars.

Carlson noted that the Department of Defense is creating body armor and flight suits for pregnant women, and is planning to change female hairstyle requirements. He also railed against the Chief of Naval Operations’ addition of the book “How To Be Antiracist,” by American University professor Ibram X. Kendi, to the Navy’s official reading list. Columbia University professor John McWhorter described Kendi’s arguments as “facile and subjective.”

The American military must have “the moral courage to include other perspectives and ideas into our decision making—perspectives that as the secretary himself noted Monday, are based on lived experience,” Kirby continued. “It’s that experience and the professionalism and commitment of our people that has always been our decisive advantage.”

Contra that word-salad of blibbering bafflegab, up until WW2 our true “decisive advantage” was an agglomeration of several real-world factors which are of much more practical combat utility than your specious “moral courage to include other perspectives” will ever be, with America’s astounding ability to ramp up and focus its peerless industrial might on production of wartime necessities including but by no means limited to weapons systems perhaps foremost among ’em.

Sure, experience, professionalism, and commitment are all wonderful things, no doubt. But they’ll never be a match for taking the boundless creative energy capitalism naturally fosters fully off the leash and letting it run wild to take on some perennial thorns in our sides, just to mix multitudinous metaphors here. To wit:

• The challenges of R&D
• Design and manufacture of materiel and equipment
• Stale concepts relating to everything from small-unit tactics to battle rifles to APCs to BDUs &c

Time and time again, it’s been demonstrated that the surest, fastest way of untangling these and other knots is via the magic of capitalist ingenuity. Which, unsurprisingly, is NOT going to meet with the approval of Obamanaut chiggers like Kirby & pals. Their first and foremost priority is Diversity; fielding a combat-ready, well-trained and -equipped soldiery determined to attain victory at any cost just ain’t it with that, man. Not for these namby-pamby Puzzle Palace chuckleheads it ain’t.

One can practically hear the girlish, mortified shrieking from our New Model PC Army: Hey, what ARE you anyway—the kind of bass-ackwards troglodyte who still believes the primary raison d’etre of national armies is to kill people, break shit, and actually WIN WARS or something? After citing a likewise disgraceful verbal assault against Tucker for his impudence launched by the ladies of the USMC PR Dept, Herschel finds himself fed up enough to deal harshly with this patent horseshit.

So aside from the notion of diversity being a strength in, say, mathematics or engineering or computer science or whatever, where physics governs processes, which I don’t think can be proven (but this is a difference discussion), let’s pose a challenge problem to the Marines.

Prove that diversity is a strength in the US Marine Corps? Prove it. Demonstrate categorically that sameness, the one intended end of all of the training my own son went through to ensure common goals, common tactics, techniques and procedures, and common devotion to duty and orders, shouldn’t have really been the goal after all.

Prove categorically that the US Marine Corps, who won multiple world wars, who has served honorably in countless other engagements, and who is the most feared strike and expeditionary force on earth, wasn’t really as good as they could be and would have been better with more diversity.

It isn’t necessary to rehearse the experience of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan where they placed women in combat roles and found a disproportionate number of lower extremity injuries, or the experience of Marine Corps infantry officer’s course at Quantico where every woman thus far has had several hip injuries or pelvic fractures.

We all know the truth regardless of the focus group wording you parrot. Repeat after me: There is no way that a woman can do the same physical things a man does. God designed it that way.

How far the Marine Corps has fallen. Shameful, loathsome and contemptible. I think your future adversaries will think the same thing.

After repeatedly denying the once-peerless US armed forces victory after victory by effectively forcing them to fight with both hands tied behind their backs, I strongly suspect that future adversaries—all of whom, according to the PC nincompoops fully and firmly in charge of things now, are actually just friends we haven’t won over yet—already DO think it, Cap’n. In fact, if you listen closely you can probably hear those future adversaries laughing all the way over here.

Decadence and an unfounded assumption of military dominance creates a societal aimlessness that has brought far mightier empires than our own to their knees. Korea, Vietnam. Beirut. Somalia. The Balkans; Iraq, Afghanistan. US Navy crews incompetent to safely navigate their ships without colliding with other vessels. The ruinously expensive F35 debacle. The USMC, USN, and USAF wholly reliant on a fleet of decrepit fifty-year-old (plus) aircraft. The ever-lengthening list of US military futility establishes a practical guideline going forward, sad as it is. To wit: any conflict that can’t be waged and won using drones operated from the safe, comfy confines of an air-conditioned trailer somewhere in the Arizona desert is probably one the FUSA would do itself a tremendous favor by avoiding.

No wonder those valiant Woke Warriors jumped so eagerly at the chance to do battle with a lone civilian TeeWee personality. They all figured the WoT (War on Tucker™) might just be one they could actually win.

Update! I’m so old I can remember when US military personnel were expected to stay the hell out of politics.

A former military officer friend likes to tell the story of attending a conference during the Jimmy Carter years. At the conference, one of the generals made a negative remark about Jimmy Carter. That general was cashiered by the end of the evening. That was appropriate behavior for a studiously nonpartisan, constitutional military that represented and defended all Americans equally. The military’s current war against Tucker Carlson for insulting it points to the end of that era.

Americans need to understand that this is not their dads’ military. It’s not even the pre-2008 military. Barack Obama purged from the Pentagon anyone who was not with the new Democrat party. This Pentagon trend worsened under Trump, as people in the modern military resented the fact that he was not starting new wars and was drawing down troops. Trump’s peaceful ways may have saved lives and money, but they lessened opportunities for advancement within the military and shut down post-retirement sinecures in the defense industry.

With Biden’s ascension to the White House, the military has become an openly partisan, pro-Democrat, possibly anti-American institution dedicated entirely to turning itself into a social justice avatar for American society while maintaining endless small wars across the globe for the benefit of military officers. George Washington weeps.

Hey, that’s nothing new; I’m sure he’s been weeping for many years now. He’s certainly had plenty of reason to.